Sep 21, 2020
Alessandro Canossa is an Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation. He is the Czar of Player Experience at modl.ai and has been straddling between the game industry and academia for many years. He has been an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Associate Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and he's now at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In his research, he employs psychological theories of personality, perception, motivation and emotion to design games with the purpose of investigating individual differences in behavior among users of digital entertainment. His research focuses heavily on these topics: a) developing behavioral analysis methods that are able to account for granular spatial and temporal events, avoiding aggregation; b) designing and developing visual analytics tools that can enable any stakeholder to produce user-driven content leveraging advanced statistics and machine learning. He was also Senior User Researcher and Data Scientist at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft studio, where he enjoyed tremendously investigating occult behavioral patterns and novel player modeling approaches while identifying the best processes for transferring knowledge from academic research to industry practices. He's now involved with Modl.AI, a company providing AI services to the game industry, where he's exploring how to triangulate data-driven insights with surveys and lab observations to advance the field of predictive analytics.